Biological inheritance is intrinsically digital: an organism's genome consists of a
finite (though admittedly large) number of positions (nucleotides), each of which may
assume one of four values (denoted A, C, G and T). Therefore the process of evolution
at the molecular level may be regarded as algorithmic information processing, realized
by the iteration each generation of a small number of operations (e.g. mutation,
recombination, natural selection).
Daniel Weinreich was introduced to this perspective as an undergraduate concentrator
in computer science, where it has a long tradition and forms the basis of what
is now called evolutionary computation. After nearly ten years
working as a software engineer in industry, Weinreich returned
to academia, motivated by a deep interest in bringing this formal
framework to bear on problems of biological evolution.
In this he was drawn by what he describes as "the challenge of understanding
biological diversity and adaptation as an 'emergent' property of a fundamentally simple algorithm."
Weinreich's Ph.D. was on the population genetics and molecular evolution of mitochondrially-encoded
proteins in vertebrates. More recently he has found that microbes offer superior
experimental systems for a diversity of technical reasons, chiefly
their small genomes, short generation time, and their tremendous ease
of genetic manipulation and phenotypic characterization. Moreover,
microbes are the causative agent of many human diseases, and much of
Weinreich's work is built on problems arising from microbial evolution in response
to clinical drug therapy.
"The problem of drug resistance evolution is something that everyone can immediately grasp",
Weinreich notes. "It gives our work another dimension of interest beyond the formal, academic
problems of molecular evolution, something that students, the lay public, other
scientists and even funding agencies appreciate."
At present, Weinreich divides his time roughly equally between theoretical and wet-lab work.
"For me, it's a two-way street: experiments are motivated by theory, and experimental results
inform new theory. I couldn't see using either approach without the other."
And it was an appreciation of this diversity of interests which drew Weinreich
to Brown. "The Center for Computational Molecular Biology represents a formal
commitment at Brown to the importance of work at the interface between computer
science and molecular biology. I look forward to getting computational students
excited about problems in biology as well as to seeing biology students enthusiastic
about the formalism that computer science brings."
Weinreich is an Assistant Professor in Brown's department of Ecology and Evolutionary
Biology and is on the faculty of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology. Before
coming to Brown, Weinreich was a postdoctoral research associate
in the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University (2001-2005),
in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University
of California at San Diego (2000-2001), and at Brown University (1998-2000).
He received his Ph.D. with Dr. Richard Lewontin at Harvard University in 1998,
and his B.S. with Dr. John H. Holland at the University of Michigan in 1983.
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